I stumbled on a nice bunch of mixing/production tips from modernbeats’s Hitalk

Here is an excerpt:

Widen Your Drum Beats

November 1, 2008

What’s the difference between a solid drum beat, and a flimsy drum beat? Many times, the difference is the mix. A good drum mix requires an evenly balanced stereo field & soundstage. Many amateur productions have narrow, almost mono, drum mixes. These narrow drum mixes throw off a song’s overall balance where instrument tracks sound too wide in comparison. An effective way to remedy the problem is to apply a few widening tricks to the kick & snare mix:

1) Starting with the kick, create a stereo field by layering the main kick with an secondary background kick. The aim here is to create ambience with the newly added background kick. A surefire method for creating ambience is to route the background kick through a short room reverb (stereo). Below, in Ableton Live, the main kick is sequenced on channel 5, with the background kick on channel 4.

Also, you can route the background kick through a low pass filter which can remove unwanted highs created from the reverb, or - depending on the reverb - you can damp the high frequencies using the reverb settings. In the diagram below, in the settings for channel 4, a high cut filter has been enabled within the reverb to knock out the high frequencies. By triggering the ambient background kick in time with the main kick, you’re able to maintain the original timbre & feel while also widening the kick’s field & depth. Take care, when layering bass drum samples, not to cause frequency conflicts. If the layered kick is out of tune or out of phase with the main kick, you produce a beat that’s flat, or attenuated.

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Most tuts are good but some of their tutorials/tips are a bit obvious but great for beginners. Overall ok site but I am always reluctant to catch phrases like Become a Hit Producer with Hit Talk’s Hit Reports…?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Their drums sounds are on point !!!!!!!!

Using Waves Renaissance’s De-Esser in pro-tools, Bassy Bob shows how he to de-ess a vocal without losing the details in the voice. Good advice from a legend!

De-Essing tutorial video

*Due to blip.tv autoplay of video I can’t embed it!

A great 3 part series from Remixmag with Timbalands protegé, Danja Hands. He goes into the details about how he put together the beat for Dj Khaled We takin’ Over. He names the synth he uses for each part, how the drum tracks were built. Using Logic 8 Good studio anectdotes. Lots of good info here…

In part 2, his engineer Marcella Araica, talks about her recording chain, tips on stacking snares and working in the studio with Timbo. She lists her fav’s plugins….too much info to list.

MUST watch for all producers!

In Session with Danja Hands part#1
In Session with Danja Hands part#2
In Session with Danja Hands part#3

WATCH ALL PARTS PEOPLE!

This is the song that are talking about!